Thomas Kurtz helped change the world by allowing humans and computers to speak the same language.
Kurtz (1928 – 2024) codeveloped the BASIC computer programming language and the first general-purpose computer time-sharing system. BASIC made personal computers possible by introducing plain-English operating instructions. The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) was a forerunner of today's cloud computing.
The developments took place at Dartmouth College. Kurtz codeveloped the technology with the person who hired him, John Kemeny, then chairman of the mathematics department and later college president.
But the duo's innovation shows necessity is the mother of invention.
Take On Tough Challenges Like Thomas Kurtz
Kurtz's breakthroughs were born aboard a commuter railroad train he routinely rode from White River Junction in Vermont at 6:20 a.m. starting in 1956.
Kurtz taught statistics and numerical analysis at Dartmouth, in Hanover, N.H., about five miles away. The train took him to Boston. Carrying a steel box stuffed with computer cardboard punch cards a little bigger than U.S. dollar bills, Kurtz's train would arrive about three and a half hours later. Kurtz then hopped a cab for the short ride across the Charles River to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
At MIT's computer laboratory he handed the cards to an operator, who loaded them into a computer. Kurtz had to wait two to three hours for the computer to digest the cards, which contained computer programs as well as data. Then he'd reverse course and take the long return trip to Dartmouth.
Kurtz repeated the ritual every two weeks for years. It took Dartmouth about five years to get its own computer — making the trip unnecessary. Kurtz knew, though, students needed to learn how to program computers. So, he took the lead in teaching students to create programs using paper tape as the input device, according to a retrospective by Dartmouth's faculty of arts and sciences.
Kurtz: Make Tools Easy To Learn
But Kurtz knew plain English instructions for computers were needed. He also knew there must be a way to share computing time between multiple users.
The use of his BASIC language opened computers to the general public. And it transformed computers from tools that could be used only by a small, high priesthood of highly trained specialists who spoke the cryptic language of computers.
"The big thing that the Dartmouth program had was that it was very easy to learn," Stephen Garland told Investor's Business Daily. Garland was a student of Kurtz and became a prominent computer scientist, whose teaching posts included University of California, Berkeley; Dartmouth, MIT and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"At the time, the most popular programming language was Fortran, which took maybe half a dozen lectures to teach. BASIC took two one-hour lectures. Students who knew nothing about computers could learn to use it," he said.
BASIC literally stands for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC and DTSS both debuted in 1964. DTSS finally allowed more than one person to use a single computer at the same time. That paved the way for the internet. "It goes beyond that really," Garland said. "It was the precursor of today's cloud computing."
Garland added, "BASIC was such a simple language. It was very easy to write a program for it. Small personal computers came out. Even the Apple and Commodore (computers), they all began to get BASIC compilers. That's what got Bill Gates" — the cofounder of technology behemoth Microsoft — "into computing. It was writing a BASIC compiler for some small machine."
Follow Your 'Crazy Idea'
Astounding to experts then and now, Kurtz and Kemeny achieved both innovations using only Dartmouth undergraduates, most of whom had little or zero experience with computers.
Kurtz recognized how revolutionary the notion was. He foresaw how much computers could become tools for personal and business tasks. In a 2014 video for Dartmouth, he said, "The target (in computing overall, not just at Dartmouth,) was research and development of computing ideas and so forth (by experts for computer, business and science applications). Whereas here at Dartmouth, we had a crazy idea that our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social science and humanity students — should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea."
Join The Race Like Kurtz
Today, laptop computers share terabytes of data on the cloud and are little bigger than a legal notepad. Computers in the early 1960s? "The IBM 7090 mainframe computer (at MIT, predating the DTSS) was about six feet high, 27 feet wide and 28 feet deep," Garland said. And computers were expensive.
Further, people who operated computers were highly trained specialists. They were typically heavyweights in mathematics or other specialized engineers. But despite early computers' size, expense and accessibility shortcomings, they emerged as tools for business and government. Computers could crunch big numbers faster than people could.
Dartmouth's then-revolutionary goal was to enable undergraduates — even those whose careers were headed nowhere near science and technology — to learn how to use computers. U.S. funding for that goal got a huge lift, starting in 1957, in reaction to the launch of the first earth orbiting satellite, Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union.
Kurtz's time-consuming journeys to MIT showed how much Dartmouth needed its own computers. Math department chair Kemeny also saw that Dartmouth could not realize his vision of a computer-literate undergraduate body without its own computers.
Kurtz understood that merely obtaining computers was not the goal. Creating a language that nonexperts could use to program and use computers was just as important. History lauds both Kurtz and Kemeny as copioneers.
The long trial-and-error experience paid off on May 1, 1964. Dartmouth students successfully ran the operating system of the first version of BASIC and ran DTSS for the first time.
Be A Regular Guy
For all of his scientific and mathematical acumen, Kurtz was also a regular guy.
"He loved traveling and so did I, so we hiked a lot," Agnes "Aggie" Kurtz, Thomas' widow, told IBD. "He was also more athletic than anyone thought. We played tennis. I was coach of the (Dartmouth women's varsity) squash team (and head of women's athletics), and he would play some of the beginners while I coached," she said.
"We were a pretty good team ... And he was a big hiker. That's how we met. A friend invited each of us to come on a hike up Mt. Monadnock (in New Hampshire). The idea was for us to meet. We were halfway up the mountain before Tom realized I wasn't one of the students," she said.
Attending computer programming conferences let the couple travel globally. "He especially liked France," Aggie said. "He liked wine. We went to nude beaches in the south of France. He didn't mind that."
The couple also bought a 150-acre property with a beaver pond in Vermont, using inherited family money. And bridge aficionados will not be surprised that math wizard Kurtz was an avid bridge player.
"He ran the Hanover bridge club for a number of years," Garland said. "He was always the one to beat. Bridge favors people who are good at math. And success doesn't rely on (reading opponents') facial expressions as much as in poker."
Kurtz was also very practical. A group from the Dartmouth math department once got stranded on New Hampshire's Franconia Ridge when they ran out of daylight while hiking. "They misjudged time," Garland said. "They were looking at their watches, not the sun. That would never have happened to Tom. He did not do crazy things."
Except, that is, for his self-described "crazy idea" about making computers easy to use.
Thomas Kurtz' Keys
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- Codeveloper of the BASIC computer language, which allowed people outside of computer science to program.
- Overcame: Enormous cost and lack of availability of early computers.
- Lesson: "We had a crazy idea that our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social science and humanity students — should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea."
